New year, new project. I wanted to revisit an old fictional universe that has been on the backburner, which we publicly called "Project Phantom." There is some old work from that project already in my portfolio. The universe is very colorful, with lots of allusions and references to ancient Egypt, occultism, alchemy, science fiction, psychology, religion, psychedelics, esoterica, and other fun stuff, told through an immersive-sim style shooter similar to System Shock 2.
One of the areas of the game takes place within a synthetically created gold mine, where the natural processes that create stone and minerals are artificially induced so that occasional gold collected from space debris can coalesce.
Within this space, my goals are to have a balance of different dualities - light and dark, synthetic and natural, wet and dry, rough and smooth.
This recent work began with some simple reference gathering and a quick and dirty B&W composition, looking to capture dimensions, line flow, and some of the key features of the space.
Some of the things that I was looking to gather in reference were things like the specularity/roughness of the rocks, the effect of not only direct light but indirect lighting from natural sources, and the different frequencies of detail and how they are distributed - where are the big rocks, where are the medium ones, and where are the small ones usually? What are the typical dimensions of these spaces? How can I sell this kind of space?
A big primary goal for this project was to utilize Ray Traced lighting in UE4 with some new hardware I have. I think Ray Tracing will offer me the bounces from tiny beams of light piercing through all this rock and bouncing around everywhere that I'm going to need to really sell this type of space. Here are some quick block outs using just the basic cube shape and default shader. I've noticed that the RTX de-noiser really doesn't like high contrast areas, but I have yet to truly fiddle with this new tech and understand how to best utilize it.
I'm looking forward to continuing to work on this project and develop this space. Right now these spaces are very dark because I'm trying to focus on the amount of natural light that is bouncing around with Ray Tracing, and dial that in before support lights are added. Much work is ahead.